Joerg Schilling wrote: > Don Lindsay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > Is anyone working on this? > > > > Now that multicore chips are everywhere, it seems like a worthwhile > > feature. I did some crude measurements on a 4P box and saw the potential > > for a decent speedup. [Specifically, untar of a .gz wasn't bottlenecked on > > IO.] > > What do you like to achive here and on which OS? > > star runs as two processes since 12 years, an archive I/O process and a > file I/O process.
I've been thinking a multithreaded tar would be nice for traversing the directory trees in parallel; if you have a very big directory tree with zillions of small files a single threaded tar ends up I assume spending most of its time waiting for the OS to stat and open files and the disc head to whizz back and forward. If you had a multithreaded tar then you could have multiple outstanding open's and stat's and directory reading with the OS and it could have a chance to order them for least head movement. Dave -- -----Open up your eyes, open up your mind, open up your code ------- / Dr. David Alan Gilbert | Running GNU/Linux on Alpha,68K| Happy \ \ gro.gilbert @ treblig.org | MIPS,x86,ARM,SPARC,PPC & HPPA | In Hex / \ _________________________|_____ http://www.treblig.org |_______/
